Ruth Teig makes coffee cakes for everyone, including staff at the DMV and workers, like the plumber and phone repairman, that come to her house. / Mark Vergari/The Journal News

Ruth Teig and her coffee cake will be featured on 'My Grandmother's Ravioli,' a show with Mo Rocca that debuts tonight on the Cooking Channel. She gave Rocca a cake to take home. / Mark Vergari/The Journal News

Ruth Teig makes coffee cakes for everyone, including staff at the DMV and people like her plumber and phone repairman. / Mark Vergari/The Journal News

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Certainly Ruth Teig knows the difference between a shlemiel and a shlamazel.

But it wasn’t her skills in Yiddish that landed the Jewish day-school teacher on Mo Rocca’s “My Grandmother’s Ravioli,’’ making its season premiere tonight on the Cooking Channel.

Teig, a cheerful Scarsdale grandmother whose repertoire includes gefilte fish and kreplach, is in fact an expert home cook with impeccable comic timing — and a perfect match for culinary novice Rocca, whose show finds him taking lessons from grandparents across the country.

The season opener focuses on Jewish cuisine.

“It’s a happy coincidence that the show was inspired by my actual grandmother’s ravioli, and kreplach is Jewish ravioli,’’ says Rocca. “We called this episode ‘My Grandmother’s Jewish Ravioli.’ ”

Though Rocca and Teig hit it off instantly, the pair didn’t meet in person until he showed up at her door with a camera crew this summer. Teig’s daughter and granddaughter had secretly written to the network, nominating her for “My Grandmother’s Ravioli” — and telling Teig only after producers called to say she was a serious contender.

Rocca, says Teig, is a bright, funny charmer who’s as down to earth as they come.

“I have loved you for years,’’ she says to Rocca in the episode, confiding in an interview that she fell hard for the host, a “Daily Show” alum and NPR regular who currently appears on “CBS News Sunday Morning.”

And what about her homemade gefilte fish, created from whitefish and pike she orders from Eastchester Fish Gourmet’s market? “It’s not that horrible stuff that comes out of the jar — forgive me, it’s like sewage. This is just magical,’’ he says, suggesting that if gefilte fish ever needed a publicist, Teig could easily assume the role.

Teig, who was born in Poland in 1935, arrived in New York when she was 11, settling with her parents and a sister in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. She’s been a math teacher for 55 years, the past 30 at the Bi-Cultural Day School in Stamford, Conn., and has two children and two grandchildren.

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Though she is a Holocaust survivor — and has been widowed twice, most recently in November — Teig exudes such delight at life’s pleasures, it’s impossible to resist her charms. “I have in the freezer rugelach,’’ she says, standing up during a recent visit to her home. “My rugelach are wonderful. Don’t say no.”

Teig’s friendliness is so overpowering, she melts the workers at the DMV in White Plains — though it may be her homemade coffee cake that allows her to move to the front of the line. “You’d be surprised how nice people are when you give them a cake,’’ she says. “Not a piece, a cake.”

Teig gives her coffee cake to her doctors, her contractor, her plumber and her cleaning lady, and makes a special sugar-free cheesecake for her dentist, who is diabetic.

She’s become so popular with repairmen — particularly those at the phone company — they practically come running when she calls. “I once had a guy who rewired my whole house and wouldn’t take any money. I gave him a tip, and of course cakes,’’ says Teig, noting there is a clear distinction between the two.

“Money is money and a nosh is a nosh,’’ she says. “You can’t go to the bank with a piece of cake.”

Yet it’s Teig’s generosity that seems to rub off on everyone she meets. Rocca, who received one of her coffee cakes after they shot the episode, ended up sharing it with colleagues. “It was difficult for me to part with it, to share it at all, but in the spirit of Ruth, I did it,’’ he says. “I gave to others.”

It was a lucky break, adds Rocca, that Teig agreed to be on television.

“Reality TV is just infected with all these people who want to be famous,’’ he says. “Ruth is the epitome of a person who has a full life” — an accidental TV star, one might add, who is neither a shlemiel nor a shlamazel.

“A shlemiel is the one who spills the soup,’’ explains Teig, in a repeat of the Yiddish lesson she offered in her kitchen this summer. “A shlamazel is the one who get the soup in his lap.”

For the chocolate nut mixture

Grease a 1 1/2-quart Bundt or tube pan. Sift the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt into a bowl. Cream the butter in a separate bowl. Add the sugar to the butter gradually and beat until the mixture is blended, about 2 to 3 minutes.

Add the eggs to the creamed butter mixture one at a time. Beat in the dry ingredients and sour cream alternately, beginning and ending in flour. Add the vanilla.

For the chocolate-nut mixture, mix the sugar, cinnamon, walnuts and chocolate in a bowl. Sprinkle about one third of the mixture over the greased pan. Pour in half of the cake batter. Sprinkle more of the chocolate and nut mixture over the batter, reserving some for the top. Pour the remaining batter into the pan. Smooth it out evenly and top with the remainder of the chocolate and nut mixture.

Bake at 350 degrees F for 45 minutes. Cool. Remove from the pan to a rack.